The central core of this article aims to theorise about the process of theatrical transitions, specifically based on the part dedicated to the “transitions” of Polish theatre in Latin America. The development of the theory begins with a fundamental question: how did and does Polish theatre influence and influence Latin American theatre, and at the same time, what were its points of departure, its routes, its journeys? In this work, the category of “transition” raises several problems. It is defined in (...) two ways, it is both an episteme and a category. Consequently, this research framework will offer to analyse, present and show which are the axes of transition that have marked the perspective of sense and meaning in Latin American theatricality from the 1960s onwards, taking as the object of study for this purpose the influences of Grotowski, Kantor and Mrożek. If so, these broad time frames would predict an “ultimate destiny” that remains to be discovered and that will “allow” us to cover long periods of time in the context of the proposed study. It is necessary to mention that the article will work on two categories of research, namely 1.- The axis present in Genealogy (Foucault): The pass, the transfers, the mechanisms of translation; 2.- On the axis of the theatrical epistemes that organise, reinterpret, distribute the discourses in their respective fields of action. Finally applying the Theory of Transitions, it will be possible to observe and study in detail the starting points, the “scenic routes” that these three creators had on the continent. (shrink)

This book visits the legacy of Jerzy Grotowski, focusing on his least known last phase of work on ancient songs and the craft of the performer. Salata posits Grotowski's work as philosophical practice, and more particularly, as practical research in the phenomenology of being.

This article is devoted to one of the most important discoveries of Jerzy Grotowski, the total act, a specific kind of action and experience. It was created as part of theatrical practice, but apart from the function related to the dramaturgy of performances, it had a higher purpose, associated with the search for the essence of humanity and sources of experience of reality. Jerzy Grotowski sought to transform actors and observers, open them to what is authentic, alive and (...) present. This achievement was a kind of experience in which the sacrum and the profanum are overcome. The total act allowed "to become watched” and, paradoxically, allowed to participate in the duality of passive action, in which man becomes an observer and agent at the same time. My goal is to describe the role of the principle of coexistence of opposites in the work of J. Grotowski. I am describing the total act as an opportunity to reach an experience of reality in which the mind and the body merge with each other. Man as a psychophysical unity precedes all differences in this archetypal experience, he is able to reach the very center of his own self, that which Jung called Selbst. (shrink)

L’articolo è l’estratto di un più ampio lavoro ancora in corso. Come Michel Foucault e Pierre Hadot, ognuno dalla propria postazione storico-teorica, ci hanno ricordato, la filosofia antica, ed in particolare quella ellenistica con i cinici e gli stoici, non era solo un discorso ma una concreta pratica di vita, un comportamento esistenziale proposto come modello per tutti coloro che intendevano raggiungere l’arete. Il testimone di questa “arte della vita” −è la tesi di fondo di questo contributo− non è stato (...) però storicamente raccolto dalla filosofia moderna −impersonale, tecnicistica, professionalizzata− ma dall’ètimo stesso delle correnti più significative delle arti moderno-contemporanee, impegnate non a produrre l’“opera d’arte” nel senso classico-tradizonale del termine, ma a proporre pratiche e modelli di vita creativi. L’esempio che qui abbiamo trascelto riguarda la pedagogia teatrale del famoso regista polacco Jerzy Grotowski. (shrink)

There is a vacuum in three generations of the Grotowski men�s lives�this becomes clear within the film�s first ten minutes. First Hank wakes alone in the middle of the night, vomits for no apparent reason, and makes a ritual trip to a lonely diner. Next Hank�s boy Sonny perfunctorily screws a prostitute who�after they have finished�tells him "you look so sad." Finally, Buck�the eldest played by Peter Boyle�wanders through the house sucking breath from an oxygen tank, adds a new (...) page to his capital punishment scrapbook, and spits racist epithets at some teenagers of color who wander into his yard. (shrink)

Due to the simultaneous linguistic and musical quality of voicing, voiced breath poses theoretical challenges to notions of ‘embodiment’, especially as they are used in theatre practice/studies. In this article, I make two intertwining arguments to address questions of the place of semantic meaning and conscious thought in performance practice/theories as they arose in my anthropological engagement with laboratory theatre. Firstly, theatre and performance practice/theories keen to embrace ‘embodiment’ often leave out things like explicit analysis, reflexivity, referential or semantic meaning (...) and so on because, as my ethnography shows, they are judged as secondary, and thus belonging implicitly more closely to disembodied ‘mind’. I engage in anthropological comparison to show how other ways of being/knowing complicate any sense in which practices labelled ‘embodied’ can be seen as primary in contrast to conscious, linguistic or explicit knowing. Instead I outline an onto/epistemology of emergence that offers an alternative imaginary in which no binaries exist a priori. Rather all is a matter of ongoing mutual constitution. Secondly, while the discourses of embodiment in performance practice/theory that I critique may continue to reproduce dualist assumptions, theatre approaches influenced by Grotowski’s anti-method, focusing on continual revision of practice, offer insights for scholarship concerned with the ontological indistinguishability of social, psychological and physical phenomena. Laboratory theatre practices offer a prospective way of knowing, enabling an exploration of the ontological equality of breath, in this case in song, and the sorts of meaningfulness associated with language and analysis. In 2011, my Nanna (grandmother in Maltese) passed away in circumstances that remain traumatic to me. I turned with to my daily practices to find ways to scream, to grieve: to anthropology and to a particular practice of song in laboratory theatre, where encounter is actively sought. Arising from ethnographic and analytic engagement with such practices, in this article, I offer an anthropologically inflected critique of notions of embodiment in performance studies and performance philosophy. I present the alternative imaginary of emergence onto/epistemologies and the prospective investigative practices of laboratory theatre. I do this by weaving autobiographical, ethnographic and anthropological threads to explore my own practice relating to the work of my collaborator Gey Pin Ang, a Singaporean director, actor and pedagogue. (shrink)

In a phenomenology of acting, Phillip Zarrilliconsiders acting as a 'question' to be explored in the studio, and then reflected upon. This book is a vital response to Jerzy Grotowski's essential question: "How does the actor 'touch that which is untouchable?'" Phenomenology invites us to listen to "the things themselves", to be attentive to how we sensorially, kinaesthetically, and affectively engage with acting as a phenomenon and process. Using detailed first-person accounts of acting across a variety of dramaturgies and (...) performances from Beckett to newly co-created performances to realism, it provides an account of how we 'do' or practice phenomenology when training, performing, directing, or teaching. Zarrilli brings a wealth of international and intercultural experience as a director, performer, and teacher to this major new contribution both to the practices of acting, and how we can reflect in depth on those practices. An advanced study for actors, directors, and teachers of acting thatis ideal for both the training/rehearsal studio and research, a phenomenology of acting is an exciting move forward in the philosophical understanding of acting as an embodied practice. n reflect in depth on those practices. An advanced study for actors, directors, and teachers of acting thatis ideal for both the training/rehearsal studio and research, a phenomenology of acting is an exciting move forward in the philosophical understanding of acting as an embodied practice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Basic Theatrical Understanding: Considerations for James HamiltonNoël Carroll (bio)The publication of The Art of Theater by James Hamilton is a seminal event in the philosophy of theater.1 As the first book-length study of theater in the analytic tradition of philosophy, it will be a touchstone for many years of future discussion and debate. Anyone interested in the philosophy of theater will need to address Professor Hamilton’s accomplishment.The leading idea (...) in The Art of Theater is that theatrical performance is an independent art form. That is, theatrical performance, as such, is not, as Aristotle suggested by his demotion of spectacle, a mere adjunct to literature, or essentially a medium for illustrating dramatic and comedic texts. Theatrical performance itself is an art in its own right. This view of theater art has been increasingly apparent in the practices of modern theater in the West, but these practices—as exemplified by Gordon Craig, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Jacques Copeau, Bertolt Brecht, Antonin Artaud, Jerzy Grotowski, and, more recently, Robert Wilson—merely revealed what has always been the case: that theater is at root a performing art.Although for centuries theater in the West had been conceptualized as a text-based art, Hamilton maintains that this tradition is local. Theatrical performances in other cultures need not be the enactment of antecedently written-out texts. Furthermore, even within Western culture, most of us see and discuss plays without ever reading the texts upon which they are based. Hamilton takes these facts to support his view that theatrical performance is an autonomous art form. Among other things, this means that the critical model that presumes that the success of a theatrical performance must be assessed against the effectiveness of its implementation of the pertinent preexisting literary text is a misguided one. Although a preexisting literary text may be an ingredient in the production of a theatrical performance, fidelity to the aforesaid text is not mandated by the art of theater. [End Page 15]Insofar as theatrical performance is an art in its own right, it may—and quite clearly, as in the cases of the Performance Group, Kraken, Mabou Mines, etc., often does—adapt written texts for its own purposes. Moreover, refashioning the text, where there is one, is not simply an avant-garde practice; most productions edit the text for their own purposes. Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet, which omitted no word from the accepted version of the text, was the exception to the rule. Thus, what Hamilton calls the ingredients model of the relation of texts to theatrical performances has the advantage on its side of better corresponding to actual practices, as compared to the notion that a theatrical performance is to be understood as a matter of bringing a literary text to life.Of course, one apparent advantage that the text-implementation model of theatrical performance might seem to possess is that it appears to have a way ready-to-hand for identifying theatrical performances. Gielgud’s performance, Olivier’s performance, and Burton’s performance are, ex hypothesi, all performances of Hamlet because they are all performances of Shakespeare’s text to which they all roughly comply. If, following Hamilton, we sever the relationship to the play-text, how can we account for the way in which we identify theatrical performances?2 That is, independently of reference to texts, how do we identify a theatrical performance as another instance of Hamlet?In order to solve this problem, Hamilton introduces the idea of “a basic understanding” of a theatrical performance. The basic understanding of a theatrical performance is, on Hamilton’s account, said to involve no more than comprehending on a moment-to-moment basis the ongoing bits of dialogue and stage action as they evolve, as well as understanding the transitions from one scene to another while also responding physically in a suitable manner to the evolving story (for example, laughing where laughter is appropriate) or emoting responsively to what is happening onstage. So, one has a basic understanding of a scene if, when the Musketeer says “On guard,” the spectator takes this to be an invitation to a duel; and when a rival character draws his sword, the... (shrink)

This essay proposes two examples of avant-garde theatre, Jerzy Grotowski's poor theatre and Augusto Boal's theatre of the oppressed, as resources for Christian ethics. Both pursue theater as bodily copresent interaction whose moral labor is the liberation of the human body from conventional gestures for the sake of authentic encounter and from oppressive postures for the sake of social intervention. Focusing on the body in this way reveals that the place of narrative, while essential to Christian ethics, is ambiguous. (...) The outcome of this argument is the possibility of combining the insights of monastic and liberation accounts of the moral life in order to release moral action in microsocial encounters, thus recovering the constitutive humility of Christian ethics. (shrink)

RELIGIOUSNESS WITHOUT GOD AND FAITH. INSPIRED BY JERZY GROTOWSKI The purpose of this article is to present a certain idea of religiousness. It could be called religiousness without God and without faith. I found its premises in the work of the Polish theatre reformer Jerzy Grotowski. He was neither a prophet nor the founder of the religion; primarily, he was a man of theatre. But for him, in the age of “God’s death” the theatre was a substitute of (...) religion and religious experience. He understood his “poor theatre” as a search for sense of life, an authentic life and the world’s salvation. At various stages of his artistic way, which I present in the first unit of this article, he tried to reach to deeper dimensions of reality. In the end, he went far beyond the theatre. In the second unit, I show the features of religiousness without God and faith. In this religiousness, God exists and does not exists, he is a question, or doubtfulness. The Faith is a physical action, instead of seriousness, we have irony, grotesque, buffo. Keywords: GOD, FAITH, RELIGIOUSNESS, JERZY GROTOWSKI. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: The Backstory: 1850s to 1950s The Decisive Influences: Brecht, Artaud, Grotowski The Decisive Years: 1961 to 1985 The Final Threads: Absorption of New Practices into the Profession and the Academy.

The subject of intercultural exchange is complex and demands that we keep the basic issues that shape our views of the world in mind. And one of these basic issues is what we mean by “European identity.” The ideological concerns over the norms of identity became necessarily entangled in the post-1989 interests and agendas of Europe’s various nations. So the great challenge for us as academics as well as for the policymakers in Brussels and Strasburg is to focus on these (...) dialectics. European identity is too varied to be a unitary and homogenous thing; indeed, one of the battles within it is between the advocates of a unitary identity and those who see the whole as a complex that is irreducible to a unified identity. In this article I explore how the theatre, in the aftermath of the Second World War, served as a laboratory for the investigation, analysis, and constuction of dramatic models that became a means of transcultural communication. As attested by the continuing success of the experimental approaches of Brecht, Grotowski, La Mama, and Suzuki, this endeavour reflected the struggle of people from different cultural backgrounds to understand and accept each other. One of the reasons the theatre continues to have the potentiality to promote transcultural integration is that it deals in concrete particulars with universal resonances. As I will demonstrate with examples from my own work in various countries, the production and directing of plays by these and other dramatists shows that it is only in the performance—by transforming the familiar into the unfamiliar, by making the habitual and customary seem strange and unexpected—that the motives, relationships, and events enclosed in the written play are released so as to stimulate the audience to re-examine their own contemporary realities. Transcultural theatre thus creates dramatic experiences that are adequate and responsive to the changing world of migration and mobility in which both practitioners and audiences actually live. As such it offers the kind of transcultural education that promotes communication and understanding and that fosters an open-eyed and open-hearted attitude to the changing realities of Europe. (shrink)

Nous faisons usage de machines, de chaussures, de cartes, en vue de notre vie, de sa conservation et de son développement. Mais c’est la vie elle-même qui est avant tout « usable », et pour laquelle machines, chaussures, cartes sont utilisées. L’ usage de soi, de son existence, est le présupposé et la poutre maîtresse de tous les autres usages. Or l’usage de soi se fonde sur le détachement de soi. Est utilisée une existence à laquelle on ne peut pas (...) toujours s’identifier, qui ne se possède pas entièrement et qui, sans être vraiment étrangère, n’est pas non plus complètement familière. Autrement dit, l’usage de la vie concerne l’espèce qui, en plus de vivre, doit rendre sa vie possible. Le jeu de scène théâtral récapitule et amplifie les procédés par lesquels l’être humain se sert de son existence. L’activité de l’acteur est un modèle incomparable de l’usage de la vie et du souci de soi. Pour reconstituer avec précision les « technologies du soi », il convient de regarder de près les écrits de Stanislavski, Mejerchol’d, Brecht et Grotowski. (shrink)

Performer Training is an examination of how actors are trained in different cultures. Beginning with studies of mainstream training in countries such as Poland, Australia, Germany, and the United States, subsequent studies survey: - Some of Asia's traditional training methods and recent experiments in performer training - Eugenio Barba's training methods - Jerzy Grotowski's most recent investigations - The Japanese American NOHO companies attempts at integrating Kyogen into the works of Samuel Beckett - Descriptions of the training methods developed (...) by Tadashi Suzuki and Anne Bogart at their Saratoga International Theatre Institute - Recent efforts to re-examine the role and scope of training, like Britain's International Workshop Festival and the European League of Institutes of Arts masterclasses - The reformulation of the use of emotions in performer training known as Alba Emoting. (shrink)

The Theater Is always Dying traces the resilience of live theatrical performance in the face of competing performative forms like cinema, television and contemporary streaming services on personal, hand-held devices and focuses on theater’s ability to continue as a significant cultural, community and intellectual force in the face of such competition. To echo Beckett, we might suggest, then, that theater may be at its best at its dying since its extended demise seems self-regenerating. Whether or not you “go out of (...) the theatre more human than when you went in”, as Ariane Mnouchkin suggests, or whether you’ve had a sense that you’ve been part of, participated in a community ritual, a Dionysia, or whether or not you’ve felt that you’ve been affected by a performative, an embodied intellectual and emotional human experience may determine how you judge the state of contemporary theater. You may not always know the answer to those questions immediately after the theatrical encounter, or ever deliberately or consciously, but something, nonetheless, may have been taking its course. You may emerge “more human than when you went in”. (shrink)

Bruce Wilshire’s work has three parts: Theatre and the Reality of Appearance; Reality and the Self; The Limits of Appearance and the Limits of Theatrical Metaphor. Chapter One covers “What Is Theatre?”, Chapter Two “What Is Phenomenology?”, both in a popular lecturer’s manner. As actor and scholar, he discusses playwrights from Sophocles to Grotowski in the rest of Part One. There is no pretense of philosophical depth or originality. But Muses are brought intelligently and enjoyably together. Only when Husserl (...) or Heidegger is rather artificially injected, does the text turn occasionally opaque. Often Part Three is similarly readable. Welcome remarks on social scientists’ abuse of “role-playing” are usefully applied to Erving Goffman’s use of theatrical metaphors in theorizing on social roles. Excellent comments on those who “dismiss religious practices as [necessarily] regressive and self-deceptive” come soon after. Too mechanical, behavioristic or cheaply cynical views of human beings are attacked, despite Wilshire’s own concessions to pessimism. At the end one reads: “it is not clear whether vital and authentic individual identity is still possible for us….We must aim for a community of compassion in which each recognizes the tragic aspects of the other”. (shrink)

A new critical reading of Aristotle’s Poetics help us to focus in a different way the debate about Aritotleism and anti-Aristotleism in XX century’s theatre. The Author thinks that a new reading of Poetics could help to understand that contemporary theatre is going towards a “neodramatic” stage and not a “postdramatic” one, that the theory of «essential actions» could not be referred only to prose and realistic theatre, and, first of all, that the question concerning the dynamic arts should be (...) considered as a central educational topic. (shrink)

Carmelo Bene is not simply to be counted among the "big players" of the twentieth century, but is the author of a "genetic mutation" in theater practice. There are, in Asia, some hermits puppeteers who daily set up a show for the gods, that is for anyone, but anyone to pass, human or animal, is welcome. Acting for the desert means to embody a posture that goes beyond the duality between nature and artifice: event that bases its effectiveness in gratitude, (...) in the surplus of life that goes from the emptiness outside to the inner one, infinitely small. (shrink)